A Tale of Two Boards: On the Influence of Microarchitecture on Side-Channel Leakage

Vipul Arora, Ileana Buhan, Guilherme Perin, Stjepan Picek*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Advances in cryptography have enabled the features of confidentiality, security, and integrity on small embedded devices such as IoT devices. While mathematically strong, the platform on which an algorithm is implemented plays a significant role in the security of the final product. Side-channel attacks exploit the variations in the system’s physical characteristics to obtain information about the sensitive data. In our scenario, a software implementation of a cryptographic algorithm is flashed on devices from different manufactures with the same instruction set configured for identical execution. To analyze the influence of the microarchitecture on side-channel leakage, we acquire thirty-two sets of power traces from four physical devices. While we notice minor differences in the leakage behavior for different physical boards from the same manufacturer, our results confirm that the difference in microarchitecture implementations of the same core will leak different side-channel information. We also show that TVLA leakage prediction should be treated with caution as it is sensitive to both false positives and negatives.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSmart Card Research and Advanced Applications - 20th International Conference, CARDIS 2021, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsVincent Grosso, Thomas Pöppelmann
PublisherSpringer
Pages80-96
Number of pages17
Volume13173
ISBN (Print)9783030973476
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event20th International Conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications, CARDIS 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 11 Nov 202112 Nov 2021

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13173 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications, CARDIS 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/11/2112/11/21

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Microarchitecture
  • Side-channel leakage
  • TVLA

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